Mighty Morphing Megadungeon

I would be lying if I said I haven’t devoted a long time to deciding where *I* would like the campaign to go. But there was this thing about staying the course…

I’ve been looking at all kinds of adventure sites and cool plot hooks and campaign things — and I have come up worth a lot of excuses as to why I want to introduce this or that, and a lot of my counter argument boils down to, “but I have this perfectly good dungeon right here.”

The players have plenty of reason to want to go there, I don’t have invent any new reasons. The baddies ate there, and the players want to go. I should be happy. And so I’m trying to figure out what happy people do in situations like this.

So last night I started mapping some new areas in the dungeon, and figuring or what has moved in since the players left — now more than six months ago.

And, this is part of what I was fussing about with, ‘what does a villain do when they acquire a new dungeon?’ tangent.

I have a perfectly capable villain move into quite a nice dungeon locale, and not only does she have a lot of money, labor, and raw materials at hand — she also has an impeccable sense of style.

One of the first things I worked out is what areas she had blocked off. The ‘original’ dungeon, such as it was, was a fire-trap, let me tell you. Silhouette is way to clever for something like that — I mean, the original inhabitants of the dungeon became trapped inside as a direct result of their poor sense of emergency planning and preparation.

Now, Silhouette is neither Batman nor a doomsday prepper (though now that I think about it, she WAS Batman for a while), but she does have a keen mind for advance preparation and her sense of self-preservation can’t be beat.

She’s installed some very simple traps since ske setup shop in the dungeon — most of them one-way doors. The current construction efforts in the dungeon have been focused on either blocking off high-value areas from intrusion or creating a facsimile of habitation.

There’s some other stuff too, and it’s that other stuff that kind of makes or breaks a mega-dungeon. What kinds of monsters has she invited to reside within the dungeon, and what kinds of critters have taken up residence in spite of her wishes?

There are dark elves, obviously. And there are lots of yuan-ti. I’m thinking another cult ought to have taken up residence within the dungeon, but I’m not quite sure of whom — or what. Maybe Obox-ob? Could be fun.